Kathy Alliou : ChromAmour at Le Bicolore in Paris, will be your second solo show in France following Apocalypstick! at Confort Moderne in Poitiers. Apocalypstick! laid the foundation for an imaginary new world, a landscape inhabited by chrysalis-forms embodying possible ways of welcoming the worlds to come; multi-colored debutante dresses in a multiplicity of shapes, perfectly set off by pop slogans inscribed in vibrant paintings. Can we see ChromAmour as a milestone, a first hypothesis for this new world, towards a new collective and utopian adventure?
Lise Haller Baggesen : Before Apocalypstick there was The Painted Book of The City of Ladies Wear, at RUSCHWOMAN in Chicago in the winter of 2022, which was the first time this shape-shifting body of work was presented, as curated by Matt Morris. It’s "Debutante Ball," if you like.
There would be no "first hypothesis” without an acknowledgement of this prequel, and of our shared baggage. You and I have been on this journey together for a while, and the metamorphosis this exhibition embodies stems from our shared adventure and vocabulary.
KA : Friendship is a fundamental component of the relationship between curator and artist. At least, that's how I consider my own role as a curator. The dimension of care, evoked by the etymology of the term, has obviously been underlined, but in my case, it's a friendship that finds its expression in a professional art practice/field.
LHB : Exactly! To the point when you can finish each other’s sentences. You were the first to point out to me that the works resemble chrysalises or cocoons, implicating the missing body as a site for transformation. I had not yet made this association, but the moment you articulated it, it hit me between the eyes like “Duh!" This is what I was trying to do all along. Therein lies its transgressive, intergenerational, collective, and utopian potential.
KA : ChromAmour is a new departure, as foretold in Apocalypstick! The sculptural arrangements made from hollow human forms, as imagined by clothes that have been worn, are a by now a regular modality of the work. Could you share the origins of ChromAmour’s chrysalis sculptures?
LHB : This shape-shifting body of works emerged from the long COVID lockdown. With everyone else in the family confined at home, I was relegated to the studio. Working with the materials at hand (vintage dresses and leftover paint tubes) new silhouettes emerged, which my daughter and I would stage in impromptu vignettes. I initiated these collaborative photo shoots as a tiny bubble of our own. A breathing space. We roamed the empty studio building in search of locations and backdrops for our costume dramas. In retrospect, despite the lockdown being a very restricted and angsty time, there was also something very liberating about it. Very feral.
I did not imagine this body of work to grow so big – or for the lockdown to take so long – but we came out of it very different than we went in. Eleanor was going through puberty, and I was headed into menopause, so there was a nice symmetry in that. There was a literal transformation, a metamorphosis, happening inside of us, in our bodies, alongside with everything that was going on in the world around us. In the very literal sense, the shredded “cocoons” – the costumes—are a both a remnant and a representation of that.
The title ChromAmour: A Metamorphosis now indicates that our collective chromophobia is over. We’re sick of being sick, we’re tired of being tired, we’re skin-hungry for the human touch, for the painted gesture, for the tactile over the digital. We’re ready for the color to return to our cheeks and to our streets.
KA : Would you say this declarative optimism is also a political stance?
LHB : Certainly. And a gender political one at that. These works first materialized under the working title WIP[Fotzepolitics] (literally: cunt politics) to indicate that a feminist’s work is never done; it is not just a hand-me-down, it’s a perpetual Work-In-Progress. Giving that the lockdown felt like the end-times, I wanted to conjure up a femi-futurist timeline that was not only sustainable but would also sustain us. And because the backdrop of a global pandemic was so heavy, I wanted to infuse it with an air of frivolity, which in turn became its DNA. I wanted it to be jubilant, to, as I put it then: Celebrate the young girl on the ruin on civilization – celebrate the old hag that is the ruin of civilization!
The Feminist movement has informed my life and practice since I came out as a self-declared “rødstrømpe” (redstocking) at age ten, in 1979. It is also a movement which has come under scrutiny in recent years. Many on the left (perhaps particularly in the U.S.) now refrain or recoil from using the f-word but has not offered us a useful term or vocabulary in its place.
But tell me Kathy, do you consider yourself a feminist?
KA : I've always been a feminist, and I've always openly claimed to be one. But that’s an understatement, because there are as many feminisms as there are individuals, and they've never stopped opposing each other, to my regret.
My feminism stems from a very personal digestion of my family history and cultural heritage. It was bequeathed to me by my mother who, although self-sacrificingly submissive, was nonetheless aware of her own actions and thus encouraged the next generation (my sister and I) to do things differently. Surprisingly, my feminism stems as much from an awareness and aspiration that I owe to my dad. He raised me “like a girl” with a panoply of behaviors culturally gendered female, but also “like a boy” with a credit of confidence and limitless horizons, and the prevalence of my personal development.
The way I lead my life in the face of social conventions in the intimate and family sphere – whether unconsciously or by deliberate choice – is rooted in a strong aspiration to self-determination and the refusal of authority. The “father figure” – which can be found within the family unit as well as in the heteronormative couple, finds its translation in the professional sphere in the role of the “mentor.” This is someone whom I have never surrounded myself with. I now see this perhaps as a limit to my professional path, paired with a kind of internalized political stiffness. However, I've never considered love, friendship, admiration or empathy as a hindrance or a difficulty. On the contrary, it is the sine qua non for my own realization.
In the end, feminism, as bell hooks will teach us, is all about love. Tell me Lise, do you share her political point of view on love, allowing us to assert that "Awakening to love can happen only as we let go our obsession with power and domination".1
LHB : Hahah… you and your trick questions! At first, I was reminded of Sting’s “If You Love Somebody Set Them Free.” I always found it kind of smarmy and disingenuous. It is so non-committal. (Or, at least, that’s how I thought about it at the time, when it was a hit and I was coming of age, and insisting on being “loved” and “free” at the same time.)
But what if, instead, we turned the premise around and asserted that “letting go of our obsession with power and domination can only happen as we awaken ourselves to love.” I think now we have something we can work with. It could be very pragmatic, like in Belle and Sebastian’s “Write about Love:”
I know a spell/
That will make you well/
Write about love/
It can be in any tense/
But it must make sense
We’re not talking about an authoritarian and instant “letting go” which is just another form of submission. (And one which we secretly bargain will sort us out and immediately fill us up with pure “Love”.) Rather it is an intention, which by incremental (and very practical and concrete) (baby-)steps will move us closer to the ineffably infinite idea, the abstraction which is “Love.” (We are talking to a child here, which is as it should be, because it is our inner child that is having trouble with the object permanence of “Love.”). As Fromm argues: "Love is as love does. Love is an act of will - namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love".2
We choose to love. Love is as love does. Does that answer your question?
KA : Yes, totally. This voluntary and transformative dimension of love naturally leads me to ask you about color, which is a fundamental element in your work as a painter and sculptor. Could you tell us more about this ‘joyful vision of the transformative power of love (bell hooks), and color (author’s comment)?
LHB : Color, like love (and power) has the amorphous ability to flood your entire field of vision. Close your eyes and turn your head toward the sun: you're back in the oceanic interiority of the womb. Open your eyes and stare into the sky’s endless blue abyss, which, when you try to define its exact color, its “blueness,” seems to fade and it seems only endless. (The sky is not the limit; the sky is limitlessness.) Let yourself be blinded by the strobe light on a crowded dance floor; you don’t make the magic happen; you are the magic.
These blissful moments are hard to recreate in a fine arts space, including galleries and museums, where we like to be intellectually and critically in control. Control most effectively is expressed in binaries of black and white. There is a tacit understanding of black and white as the stark representation of the factual, of “things as they are.” In contrast, color represents the utopian promise of “things as they could be.” In the annals of power, color is like cursing in the church — just look at the graphic color scheme of fascism, with its dramatic red, white and black, vs the more forgiving and inclusive rainbow banner. Our response to color is emotional; it opens (us) up (to) the possibility of the profane, the ridiculous, and the sublime. We seldom cry in museums, but maybe it’s okay to cry, or laugh, a little more in these spaces, and maybe color can help us get there? I once wrote in a book that “when you mix red, white and blue, it makes lavender.” If that sounds naively, and willfully, utopian, it is because it probably is.
KA : As we also talked about during our shared “Hammock Philosophy” residency3, you seem to have an uninhibited or confident relationship with utopia, a confidence in the capacity of the formal modalities and arrangements that you create to make a project. Their original or regular confrontation with crisis, stasis, and critical modalities does not obstruct the development of common possibilities.
LHB : If by “confidently utopian” you mean to say that say that I fall squarely in the artist- category of “world as it could be,” I would say that is astute. This is also a political stance, because in my opinion there is a dearth of visionary positions on the left. To get out of this impasse we must suspend our disbelief.
So, it’s a world building project. A mandala. Which means it is imaginary, transitory, modular, and instable. Which in turn means that it can be whatever we need it to be. Seeing is not believing, but it is a practice.
KA : I also think that this “world as it could be,” far from being a sweet dream, is based on pragmatism, awareness and analysis of what the world lacks, and therefore a hope that it can change, be transformed. Hope is the key word of Utopia. World building is a defining quality of art making. Looking back, can we see from the large ensembles Mothernism, WIP (Fotzepolitic) then Apocalypstick and now ChromAmour, a broadening of the idea of community towards something beyond human organizations? How has this evolution operated in your work?
LHB : Let me ask you a counter question: what is “beyond human organizations?” Are we looking toward interspecies relationships here? The wood-wide web? The cellular super-structurers of mycolic acids, myocilin and mycelium? Or even further into the realm of cosmology and spirituality? You might define all of the above as “human organizations” at least to the extent that we have built language and behavior around them, to classify, accommodate, and describe them. These systems and structures “organize us” as much as we “organize them.” The idea being that matter has agency, that you may want something from the world, but that the world may equally well want something from you. That once you get in deep with a body of work, the material may lead your hand as much as the other way round. For argument’s sake, let’s say that “human organizations” belong in the realm of the political and the community. And that “beyond” that, is the realm of “vibrant matter”4. Which is where I strive to evolve toward in my work.
KA : Let's continue to talk about your painting, the material and the role it has played since your training, on the one hand, but also by the pop way in which it has manifested its return more recently. It holds a very syncretic place in your practice.
LHB : Of course. Color, and paint, is where it all began for me. I am trained as a traditional figure painter, so every departure is also a way back to the easel. Painting is a very concrete way of thinking through materiality. Of thinking through our relationship with this material world, not just with our minds, but with our hands. This is expressed most aptly in my favorite quote by Foucault: “Why paint if not to let yourself be changed by your own painting?”
With the works at hand, I got very excited about the ways in which the color pigment and the polyester satin interacted. To paint from shine and color saturation into something more muted and matted and mineral. From jewel tones and back into the mine. It struck me that they were, on a very primordial level, different manifestations of the very same thing. Polyester is a petroleum-based product, derived from crude oil. Dead dinos. The carrier in fine oil paints is linseed oil, a vegetable compound but with similar organic properties. The boat is oil and the river is oil.
KA : I see a form of term-to-term equivalence between the palette in painting and the blank page for other narrative practices that involve writing, including music of course.
LHB : Totally. Although the way I treated the blank canvas in this case – by using it as a palette before inscribing it with a pattern, a slogan or a pop lyric, to create a “residual painting” – was a way of circumventing the fear of the blank canvas, the writer’s block. To put the matter before the mind, or to put it differently: Free your ass and your mind will follow!
KA : In retrospect, I have the feeling that while your palette-paintings enabled the painted dresses, in a larger way it allowed you to make a detour and thus an uninhibited return to painting. The Grand Genre that you hadn't neither practiced nor claimed for decades.
LHB : Not quite decades, but yes, this method allowed myself a more laissez-faire attitude toward painting; I didn’t have to ask permission to paint – and let me remind you that when I started with this body of work there really wasn’t anyone around to ask.
KA : In my text “Through which tomorrow is already given birth” in the paragraph on your work, I quoted Donna Haraway’s “Make kin not babies”. How do you, you who was among the first to work on the dialectic “art and motherhood” as a structuring issue in your work, hear this issue resonate with Haraway today?
LHB : I don’t know how to answer this question. I looked up the definition of dialectic: “systemic reasoning, exposition or argument that juxtaposes opposed or contradictory ideas and usually seeks to resolve their conflict. Dialectic thinking recognizes that reality is complex and multifaceted and that several (seemingly) oppositional ideas or can be true at the same time.” As such, the statement “Sometimes it snows in April” could be presented as a dialectic but actually it is not. It is just how the world works on an observable scale. I would posit that “art and motherhood” works along similar lines.
Last time we spoke, in our interview for Apocalypstick!, we spoke a lot about Haraway, and Staying with the Trouble. I admire her, of course. I think she’s prescient, and her work remains relevant, but the thing is… I don’t really subscribe to these so-called “dichotomies” Art vs Motherhood; Goddess vs Cyborg; Kin vs Babies; Punk vs Disco. Mothernism was all about that.
Recently, on Instagram, I learned that Octavia Butler once said that “predicting doom in difficult times may have more to do with the sorrow and depression of the moment than with any real insight into future possibilities. Superstition, depression and fear play major roles in our efforts at prediction.” She said “our tomorrow is the child of our today. Through thought and deed, we exert a great deal of influence over this child, even though we can’t control it absolutely. Best to think about it, though. Best to try and shape it into something good. Best to do that for any child.” Butler hits the nail on the head, with regards to how art and motherhood need each other. How artmaking and care-work are essentially the same thing. An invested concern for our tomorrows.
Now that Björk is everywhere again (including the Centre Pompidou) I am reminded of an early(-ish) interview with her, I believe in NME. I quoted it in the (very modest) publication which accompanied my first solo show Close Encounters of the Kind, in Amsterdam, back when I was still a figure painter. On the topic of her idiosyncratically futuristic sound, she explains: “it’s the opposite of your old rock’n’roll tune which is traditional and conservative, like oak or something. God and the Devil, the oldest story ever told. If you want to go into aliens and somewhere you’ve never been before you end up with some kind of chamber music atmosphere, not earthbound. We don’t want any of that earthbound now, do we? We wanna get lost! And we wanna get fucked! Lost and fucked!” This was in 1996.
Now, almost 30 years on, we can safely say that we are both lost and fucked in ways that we could not have entirely predicted, nor would have wished for – back when the internet was still a common, not yet privatized by Meta, and space race not yet conquered by Elon Musk. We are by now sufficiently alienated. So, I think – and I think Björk would agree, what with her mycelian melodies and her emotional landscapes – that the only way forward is through. And earthbound in the sense that we must get used to the idea that what happens on earth stays on earth, that every atom of us is of this place, that we are just rearranging the same molecules. It is cyclical. God and the Devil, the only story ever told. But different this time. There is no there there, and no outside, and if that seems claustrophobic, that’s is only on the surface level. It is incredibly rich and strange, and spiritual, this material world. Frivolously and eternally evolving.
KA : The notion of “frivolity” is part of your repertoire of concepts, like that of “metamorphosis.” What is the link that you develop between these two notions?
LHB : The direct link between the two concepts is that the ongoing metamorphosis of evolution is driven by frivolity (abundance) as much as scarcity (survival).
You and I first spoke of frivolity in relation to the French Supports / Surfaces movement, a very important – very serious and macho – moment in art history in which painting freed itself of the constraints of the canvas and the stretcher, and with it the whole picture plane. It got very concrete, in other words, and directed toward the very gesture of painting, of mark making. I, in turn, took this mark making and put it on a satin dress, adding a (hyperfeminized) twist to this territorial gesture. When, at your recommendation, I was reading Emanuele Coccia’s Metamorphosis, I got very excited about his idea of “evolution as a fashion show of the flesh.” That natural selection is driven as much by a quest for beauty, as it is by what Darwin dubbed “survival of the fittest.”
That mother nature is an artist, in other words. (And God is a DJ :) That rang very true to me! But, If God really is a DJ, let me ask you, Kathy: What is your favorite love song?
KA : I realize that this is a new exercise for me, as I'm used to questioning more than answering, and therefore I feel a little uncomfortable doing it. I prefer to introduce myself, or even reveal myself, by talking about work/art. Without the artistic subject as mediation, I'm not quite sure what the point is of making my passions public...
But, if I must. I didn’t have precise ideas in mind about my favorite love songs before you asked. What is still present in my mind is my first kiss and then my first flirt, while slow dancing to "Only you" by The Platters. It is more my parent’s generation than mine, but still ideal song to kiss long(ing)ly. There are many songs that I do not consider love songs, being sad and mostly songs about an ending or impossible love. My sensitivity leads me more to passionate & frivolous ones, such as "Head over heels" by Tears for fears (1985) and Kylie Minogue’s famous 2001 hit "Can’t get you out of my head". As a result, although I like these two songs, I don't think they're in the top 10 of my favorites songs, which tend to lead me towards bands that cultivate more ambiguity.
Speaking of ambiguity; Your sculptures are surprising in their ability to create volume as well as to unfold in an installation. They are polymorphic, modular, dynamic, “almost alive”, attractive, also changing...
LHB : Aww shucks, you’re making me blush!
1 Bell Hooks, All about Love : New Visions, 1999, William Morrow
2 Erich Fromm, as quoted in bell hooks “All about Love”
3 The term “Hammock Philosophy was coined during Lise Haller Baggesen’s residency in the Danish Arts Workshop/Statens Værksteder for Kunst (SVFK), combined with a curatorial visit by Kathy Alliou, made possible by a grant by the Danish Arts Foundation, Copenhagen, July 2021. It is a term of endearment, or a pun, referencing Sade’s “Philosophy of the Boudoir,” although much more chill.
4Jane Bennett « Vibrant Matter: a Political Ecology of Things » Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2010.
5 Kathy Alliou “Schon der morgige Tag gibt sich hin, geboren zu werden” https://digital-classroom.kuma.art/de/schon-der-morgige-tag-gibt-sich-hin-geboren-zu-werden-teil-ii-die-entstehung-neuer , Text commissioned by Kunsthalle Mannheim, Germany, in January 2022, in the context of the exhibition “MOTHER!” 1rst of October 2021 to 6th February 2022.
6Kathy Alliou & Lise Haller Baggesen “Speculative Biography of an Alliance” in APOCALYPSTICK! Confort Moderne, Poitiers, 2023.
